SOME
NOTES ON THE TURKISH ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE

Richard Chambers /
Chicago University

Since 1928, Turkish has been written
in a slightly modified Latin alphabet which is very nearly phonetic.

The Turkish alphabet has 8 vowels (A
E I İ O Ö U Ü ) and 21 consonants. The letters Q,W and X do not exist in Turkish. Most
letters are pronounced pretty much as you would expect, but some are not. Once the
phonetic value of all letters is known, then it is rather easy to pronounce any word one
sees or to spell any word one hears.The following letters require explanation:

Aa = "a" as in
"card" or "dark", never as "a" in"cat" or
"back" ( kan = blood )

Turkish belongs to the Turkic branch of the
Altaic language family.The earliest Turkic inscriptions date from the 7th century C.E. and
Islamic texts written in Turkic appear in the 11th century. Turkish, the language of
modern Turkey, is spoken by about 60 million people. Other important Turkic languages are
Azeri (15 million speakers) and Uzbek (14 million speakers). Turkish formerly used the
same alphabet as Arabic, but has been written in the Latin alphabet since 1928 as
mentioned above; since 1940, Azeri and Uzbek have been written in Cyrillic but efforts are
now under way to replace it with Latin.

As an Altaic language, Turkish has virtually
nothing in common with English or other Indo-European languages except for some loan
words, usually from French or English.

Turkish grammar is complex, but also quite
regular. Its two most characteristic features are : (1) vowel harmony (vowels within a
word follow certain harmonic patterns) and (2) agglutination (addition suffixes to words.)
Through this process, astoundingly long word phrases can be encountered. For example, the
following means, "Maybe you are one of those whom we were not able to Turkify."

Türkleştiremedigimizlerdensinizdir.

Another interesting feature is that there is no
gender in Turkish.The same word , "o", for example, means "he",
"she" and "it".

Turks generally call each other by their given
names.For example, a man whose name is Ahmet Kuran would be called Ahmet bey( bey = Mr.),
and his wife whose name is Ayşe Kuran would be called Ayşe hanım ( hanım =Ms.). Good
friends drop the "bey" and "hanım". But a letter would be addressed
to Bay ve Bayan Ahmet Kuran (Mr. and Mrs...).